The present disclosure relates to a medical image storage processing apparatus, method, and program for storing a medical image and the result of image processing for the stored medical image in association with the image.
Recently, development of image processing for medical images has been in progress and even in two-dimensional viewers, those having very sophisticated image processing functions have been proposed. More specifically, it is practiced to perform image processing on volume data captured, for example, by a computed tomography (CT) system to extract and display anatomical features, such as pulmonary apex, liver top, and the like.
Such sophisticated image processing functions are very useful to improve diagnostic accuracy of medical images but, on the other hand, it may sometimes require several tens of seconds from the start of an image processing function by the user until the result of the processing is available, simply because of sophisticated image processing, which is undesirable from the viewpoint of diagnostic efficiency.
Hence, it is proposed that, at the timing of capturing and storing a medical image, image processing requiring a relatively long time is performed on the medical image and the result of the image processing is stored in advance.
In the meantime, when interpreting a medical image, a comparative interpretation is performed in which a medical image captured at this time and a medical image captured in the past are comparatively observed. For example, Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. 2012-157557 and Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. 2013-084309 propose to perform the same image processing on the two medical images when performing the comparative interpretation for ease of comparison between the two images.